Recent developments have shown FPGAs to be effective for data centre applications, but debugging support in that environment has not evolved correspondingly. This presents an additional barrier to widespread adoption. This work proposes Debug Governors, a new open-source debugger designed for controllability and interactive debugging that can help to locate issues across multiple FPGAs.

Wireshark-based debugging can be performed on ordinary desktop computers at 1G speeds, but only powerful computers can keep up with 10G. At 100G, this debugging becomes virtually impossible to perform on a single machine.This work presents FFShark, a Fast FPGA implementation of Wireshark. The result is a compact, relatively inexpensive passthrough device that can be inserted into any running 100G network. Packets will travel through FFShark with no interruption and minimal additional latency. A developer can send standard Wireshark filter programs to the FFShark device at any time; packets that satisfy the filter will be copied and sent back to the developer’s workstation over a separate connection.We show that our open source passthrough device has lower latency than commercial 100G switches, and that our design is already capable of handling 400G speeds.